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Laptop checkout

That's right! Laptop checkout!

If you didn't bring your laptop, borrow one of the library's Chromebooks. Log in with your WMU Gmail account, and all your Google Drive files are ready for you to work on. Your authorizations to library services are mostly automatic. You can collect PDF's, gather data in a spreadsheet, or annotate e-books. When you log out, the laptop keeps no trace you ever used it, but the work you did on it will be available to you in the cloud from whatever machine you log into next.

Chromebooks don't do everything you can do with a PC or a Mac. You can save a Google Doc as a Word document, and read or import a Word file, but it won't do all the fancy formatting that Microsoft Word will do. You can also do a lot with Google Spreadsheets, although it lacks some of the more arcane functionality found in Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Spreadsheets that some users occasionally need. Even so, your data in Google spreadsheets can be exported to those programs on such occasions. (But Google Slides, it should be noted, gives Microsoft PowerPoint a strong run for the money). There are also numerous third party party products that are integrated with Google Drive and freely available to educational users (such as WMU students and staff) that you can use to edit photos, layout pages for print publication, or create charts and diagrams.

OK, so you won't be editing videos or compiling C++ on a Chromebook. It's only built for the cloud. But if you haven't noticed, there's actually a lot you can do on the cloud, and using one of our Chromebooks beats going all the way back to the student residence for your laptop, right?